Sandy Hook and Wag the Dog Our perception in regards to reality is frequently “in the hands of” of our community, and we form our beliefs in regards to what is real is through the media. Therefore, the documentary “We Need to Talk about Sandy Hook” by Sofia Small storm and the film “Wag the Dog,” by Barry Levinson are both examples of how the media tries to deceive people. The documentary has deceived the pubic into believing that the Sandy Hook Massacres did exist, and Wag the Dog tries to trick the public into believing that the United States will be at war. Both films use deceptions that are planned by the government to deceive the public for their own needs. Therefore, although people rely on media for legitimate information, they never know the truth unless it was experienced first hand. Many people believe that the Sandy Hook massacres really happened. There are many reasons for which people should believe that it is true. It was all over the media. Parents were being interviewed. There was proof that the police had been summoned, and twenty students and six adults had been killed. However, there are many …show more content…
What people may perceive as reality can be created to benefit the goals of those who are in power. Wag the Dog explores the distortion of truth for the upholding of power and also explores how the government manipulate its citizens in faking the reality and playing on the naiveté of the public. Therefore, in Wag the Dog, Levinson poses the question of how truth is manipulated by power. In the opening we are asked to reflect on what is real in regards to public rule in the democratic electoral process through the metaphor of the title of film considering that the idea of the tail wagging the dog warns the public to the shocking truth of manner in which the government manipulates its
I am not a huge believer on conspiracy theories, but there’s something odd about Sandy Hook. The amount of un-answered question, break-ups in the media, and flaws in the timeline. Nothing seemed to add up about this particular “tragedy”. The farther I dug into the story, the longer I sat there in disbelief. I was scared, confused, and most of all, angry! I couldn’t believe the government I live under, the one that is supposed to keep my family safe from certain situations is staging horrific tragedies to veer the country’s attention away from other issues.
"[It's] not a war. It's a pageant. We need a theme, a song, some visuals," states Conrad Brean, the White House's Mr. Fix-it, referring to the plan designed to divert the public's attention from the incumbent's recent disastrous decision-making. The fabricated war and astonishing public response depicts the unfortunate credulity our society suffers from in Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog. Produced in 1997, the satire displays phenomenal insight into the media's effective use of rhetoric to influence the public opinion.
There is no supporting evidence to prove that this massacre took place. Theories and Supported Evidence The Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to convince the public that this event did not actually take place. The media and the Federal Bureau of Investigation provided coverage to prove their stance on the Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax.
Not one person from Sandy Hook, Connecticut ever thought this sort of event would ever happen. On December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members in a mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Before the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at his home in Newtown, Connecticut. After the shooting, Lanza successfully committed suicide before he was detained. Which left, the state, officials, and the entire country to question why Lanza would do such a horrible act of violence to innocent children and staff members of the school. Also, questioning the security of schools, and even our country. There are many conspiracies of the
The everyday person is easily susceptible to what the media has to tell. The media can tell us put our focus
Throughout history, and still today, Americans have looked to popular media outlets to stay up to date on the current issues our nation is involved in. Many Americans take the news reported at face value instead of digging deeper than the headlines to do a little of their own research. A clear majority of those Americans believe if they read it in the newspaper or see it on social media, it must be true. However, the media is notorious for manipulating the facts in order to advance the American government’s agenda. A manipulating media circuit is nothing new. An example of this is the USS Greer incident. Multiple media reports helped advanced President Roosevelt’s desire to engage in war by publishing inaccurate reports from the September 4, 1942 incident.
The media in American society has a major influential impact on the minds and beliefs of millions of people. Whether through the news, television shows, or film, the media acts as a huge database for knowledge and instruction. It is both an auditory and visual database that can press images and ideas into people's minds. Even if the individual has no prior exposure or knowledge to something, the media can project into people's minds and leave a lasting impression. Though obviously people are aware of what they are listening to or watching, thoughts and assumptions can drift into their minds without even realizing it. These thoughts that drift in are extremely influential. The massive impact it
While the nation mourned the tragedy of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, Jones spun vile theories about how the murders of 20 young children and six adults were actually an elaborate performance by the United States government. According to Jones, there was no Sandy Hook.
2. In the 21st century exposure to media is an everyday event for most of us. Even at the grocery store, we see magazines and newspapers with eye-catching headings that may not be true. Also, the news is everywhere, and with technology on the rise, we even get news alerts on our phones. The media has taken over society. Most of the stories we read about seem to be true but in reality, are they giving a true insight of what is actually happening? Some of the stories cause people to become blindfolded from reality. This is because the stories that people read or see have a profound impact on shaping our reality rather they are true or not. We see the news about events that are going on in the world; rather they are catastrophic events or devastating events that were done by humans.
Stories sometimes are true and sometimes they are false but it is up to the public to believe in what is right and what is wrong. In this day and age, where information is available at the touch of a mouse, it’s not surprising that the media is a particularly dominant and powerful
Although the movie Wag the Dog is a comedy about a completly fake war, written and produced by a top Hollywood producer and a presidential Mr. Fix-It in order to take the focus off of a presidential sex scandel 11 days before the election, it does have a serious message to impart - Don't believe everything you see on TV. Sure, parents tell their kids that the man on TV isn't really dead, it's all fake, and we all know that movies and sitcoms and dramas aren't real, they're written and acted. But we believe the shows not labelled fiction. We watch documentries and biographies and absorb the information as the truth. When we watch the news at 6:00 pm every evening, and read the paper over coffee and breakfast, we believe everything
If you research on the computer, the Columbine school shooting, Fort Hood or Virginia Tech, you will not find any evident conspiracy theories attached to them. Yet the horror that occurred at the Sandy Hook School shooting has lots of unanswered questions. There is a lot of
John Pilger’s ‘The War You Don’t See’ promotes many strong ideas, with a strong focus on the value of honesty and the lack of it. Raising the issue of when the media do not do their job, the public is manipulated as we are not told the whole truth therefore are not aware of the horrific and
As Griffin (2009, p. 364) so concisely stated, “the media aren’t very successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about”. In more recent times, the direction of this theory has changed. Scholars have begun to focus on how the media “frame” social issues through the inclusion and omission of certain attributes of particular events (Ruddock, 2013). “Framing” refers to the forming of narratives and concepts that deliver meaning as an event unfolds (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). Themes such as media violence, particularly in the event of a school shooting, are often used to repeatedly reinforce social norms that are deemed important by the media. As a result, generic stereotypes are inevitably cast and the potential copycat behavior advertised.
When two planes went into the world trade center on 9/11, this attack was highly publicized, showing on almost every television, newspaper, and computer in America, and around the world. One commercial, after the attack, showed an American neighborhood, telling how 9/11 affected the nation. Before the attack, it was a typical American neighborhood, after the attack, every house was flying a flag. Was everything in the media accurately told? Manipulation is defined as controlling in a skillful manner. Many were on board with the war after all of this “breaking news terrorist attack” happened, which happened to be brought to the American people by U.S. news corporations, and the U.S. Government. There is a history of how government, and other media uses propaganda to control how we